AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY is a compelling factual history of neoconservatism and its influence on US Foreign Policy in the Middle East during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Click on image above for details.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Other periods of time have been mentioned over the three decades since the Iranian people kicked out the Shah as to how long it would take the Iranians to build a nuclear weapon, but six months seems to a very popular nominal figure. Never mind, of course, that there has not been a skerrick of evidence to even suggest that the Iranians are doing anything more than building nuclear reactors for generating electricity or creating medical isotopes for medical purposes. But that hasn’t stopped the propagandists who seem to insist that Iran is still only six months away from having a nuclear weapon.

If I started the list of claims that Iran would have a weapon within six months from back in 1980 when the Shah went, you’d still be reading it in, well… six months time! So, I’ll cut short the list and start it off with some of the earlier claims of this century.

Back in August 2003, the LA Times reported that Iran could have a ‘nuclear weapon in six months’. More than two years later in September 2005, Israel claimed Iran would have ‘nuclear weapon in six months’. Then, nearly three years later in June 2008 we were told again that Iran would have a ‘nuclear weapon in six months’. A year later, in July 2009, Ha’aretz reported that ‘Germany believes Iran could have a nuclear bomb in six months’.

Now, in the very latest statement dated 23 February 2010, made by so-called ‘Iran weapons expert’, David Albright, Iran, in his expert opinion, is now only… wait for it; six months away from having a nuclear weapon. This is the very same David Albright that was telling us more than a year ago in February 2009; “In as quickly as a few months, Iran would be able to have enough weapons-grade uranium for nuclear weapons”. It’s also the very same David Albright who told the CBS ’60 Minutes’ show way, way back in January 1999 that Saddam Hussein was “within a few months to a year of having a nuclear weapon”.

Albright? Not very! He’s the original boy that cried ‘Wolf!’ Unfortunately, the media will continue to echo his and similar cries and there will be those that believe them. Eventually the West, led by Israel and the US, will attack Iran based on these lies, but the worst of it is; hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of dead later, the rest of world will go along with it without a murmur.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Extra-judicial killings have always been a part of Western governmental culture. Recently, however, this activity has taken on a new turn inasmuch that they are being carried out without any effort to hide the fact that they are happening. They call them quite openly; ‘targeted assassinations’. The US and Israel have, until now, been relying on the public’s acceptance, at least in the West, that in the so-called ‘War against Terrorism’ the people that are being killed are the West’s enemy.

At first, while the shock of the attacks on the World Trade Center was still sinking in, the West were in no mood to question the methods the US and their allies used to ‘rid the world of terrorism’. But, as time went by and the initial shock began to subside, people began to question whether or not it really was ‘Islamic terrorists’ that perpetrated this crime. It was realised that those who we were told were ‘terrorists’ might instead be merely innocent scapegoats of Western greed and subterfuge.

After the way the Israelis behaved in their onslaught against the people of the Gaza Strip in 2006 and then again in 2008/2009, for example, many in the West wondered if, rather than being ‘terrorists’ as we were told, that the Palestinians that were labelled ‘terrorists’ by the Israelis and the US were actually nothing more than freedom fighters defending themselves against the deprivations and terrorism of Israeli Zionism. Israelis had for years been terrorising the Palestinians by murdering their leaders in state-sponsored extra-judicial killings – killings that usually not only killed the intended target, but often killed many innocent civilians as well.

In Afghanistan the US have recently been using similar methods against the Taliban using drone remote piloted vehicles (RPVs). The West has also been using Special Forces to what they euphemistically call; ‘taking out the bad guys’, whereby highly trained murderers sneak up on an unsuspecting and usually sleeping fighter defending his homeland from foreign invaders and then murder him and usually most of his family as well.

Slowly but surely the Western media have been acclimatising the public to a point where it now is (almost) an accepted norm in modern war-fighting – providing, of course, that it is ‘us’ doing it to ‘them’ and not ‘them’ going it to ‘us’, which would then become totally unacceptable.

Now, however, the situation has taken a new turn.

A few years ago the US launched a rocket from a drone that killed a number of so-called ‘terrorists’ travelling in an SUV. All in the vehicle were killed but among them was an American citizen. Compounding the crime was the fact that the US knew that there was an American citizen in the vehicle when the order was given to kill. Now the US is working on the legal aspects of how American citizens may be extra-judicially murdered by Presidential decree if they are found to be working with America’s enemies overseas. One has to wonder if the next step is likely to be the President giving clearance for American citizens to be extra-judicially murdered in the US simply for aiding America’s ‘enemies’ or even writing stuff that is anti-American and therefore considered as aiding America’s ‘enemies’.

Sounds far-fetched? Not really when you consider that before 9/11, while one suspected that the US very covertly did do away with its enemies, one would have never dreamed that such killings would become an everyday norm that would be accepted as part of modern living. The next step of bringing death to inside American living rooms (and I don’t mean via the TV) is not, it seems, a very big step the way things are going at the moment.

Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne, Australia, ‘Herald-Sun’ newspaper (owned by who else but Rupert Murdoch), wrote in his column today that “If Israel killed Mabhouh, it was… because of the threat he posed to the lives of Israelis today”.

Based on Bolt’s logic, one could argue that, if it’s OK to assassinate people that are a threat to you, then it would be OK for Hamas to assassinate, say, Gabi Ashkenazi, Israel’s chief of staff, on account of the threat he poses to the lives of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Not only does this sorry excuse for an Australian support the notion of targeted assassinations, but he actually criticises those that speak out against the practise. If this Murdoch-paid racist lunatic had his way, he’d no doubt be happy to extra-judicially execute all of the West’s enemies – particularly if they happen to be Muslims and better still if they’re in Australia if the way he relentlessly demeans and vilifies Islam in Australia is anything to go by.

Bolt wrote: “Fraser’s [referring to Malcolm Fraser, a former Australian Prime Minister] suggestion that Jews are just trading on the Holocaust dead is morally despicable, and bordering on anti-Semitism.”

What Fraser actually was quoted as saying was, “the Jewish state could no longer use the Holocaust as an excuse to justify state-sanctioned murder, and criticism of its policies should not be dismissed as anti-Semitism”.

Clearly, Fraser was not referring to ‘Jews’ generally as Bolt asserts but to the ‘Jewish State’, the Zionist State, whose apparatchiks have indeed invoked the Holocaust to justify killing their enemies claiming that such killings are aimed at preventing another ‘holocaust’. The reality, of course, is that Mabhouh, who certainly did buy arms for Hamas, was not doing so in order to create another ‘holocaust’ but simply to defend Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from the Israelis that frequently invade and indiscriminately kill civilians in the Gaza.

Fortunately, most Australians don’t go along with Bolt’s Islamophobic and other blatantly racist nonsense, but it’s unfortunate that the vocal few that do support him and several others of Murdoch’s propagandists are the ones that are bringing Australia’s reputation as a successful multicultural society into disrepute.

Friday, February 26, 2010

There was a time until quite recently that the phrase ‘anti-Semitism’ or ‘anti-Semite’ quite rightly meant something very important.

It denoted a very real racism that existed against Jews by others that felt that their race was superior simply by virtue of their birth and their own race. This racism culminated in the attempted destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War by some anti-Semitic Germans and other anti-Semitic Europeans. After the war some anti-Semitism persisted, mainly by white supremacist-style groups in Europe and America. The vast majority of people around the world, however, either ridiculed or regarded such people merely as fringe extremists and took little or no notice of them to the point that to be called an anti-Semite was considered insulting, in much the same way as being called a Nazi or a fascist today is for most people also insulting; a far cry from the 1920’s and 1930’s when it was considered almost fashionable to call oneself a fascist or a Nazi or even an anti-Semite. But after the war, and certainly by the 1970’s, the terms generally became derogatory.

But then things began to change. Zionists, those that had created the state of Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people, increasingly began to accuse people who objected to the way the Zionists were dealing with the Palestinians of being ‘anti-Semites’ in the hope that the stigma of being labelled an ‘anti-Semite’ would stop people from criticising the Zionists as they went about committing the exact same crimes against the Palestinians that were committed against them during the Second World War, and, to a certain extent, the fear of being labelled an anti-Semite worked and the world took little notice of how the Palestinian people were being treated.

By 2007, however, when Mearsheimer and Walt wrote their book, ‘The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy’, the use of the ‘anti-Semite’ smear was used again vigorously by Zionists anxious to deflect Mearsheimer and Walt’s assertions. But this time it didn’t work.

The world had woken up to the reality of Zionist barbarism as it witnessed the way the Zionists mercilessly bombarded innocent civilians and destroyed their homes in Lebanon on 2006 and then again in the Gaza Strip in 2008/2009. Zionist history became exposed. The dreadful massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla under the auspices of the Israeli Zionists demonstrated to the world the real meaning of Zionism and discovered that Zionism was actually little better than Nazism. But the more this was pointed out to the Zionists, the more the Zionists screamed that to be anti-Zionist was to be anti-Semitic.

Even Jews that object to Zionism are now being labelled ‘anti-Semitic’. It’s got to the point where the label ‘anti-Semitic’ is now beginning to mean that one is merely ‘anti-Zionist’ but not a hater of Jews. As a result of this abuse of the label by Zionists, its credibility is rapidly diminishing and it won’t be too long before the term ‘anti-Semite’ becomes entirely meaningless and is given over to meaning only that one is an anti right-wing Zionist. Once the true meaning of the phrase ‘anti-Semite’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ has been forgotten, then it will be a matter of time before people once again call them selves ‘anti-Semites’ if they believe that it only means being anti-Zionist.

Zionism is a political ideology. It has nothing to do with race or Semitism. It has everything to do with creating a political empire at the expense of other peoples.

The Zionists abuse of the phrase ‘anti-Semite’ and ‘anti-Semitism’, in the end, makes them the real anti-Semites.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Andrew Bolt, together with a motley collection of Australia’s leading racists and white racism deniers that included Janet Albrechtsen, John Stone, John Herron, David Flint, Bob Carter, Gavin Atkins and John Howard, gathered in Sydney last night to celebrate race theoretician Keith Windschuttle’s third attempt at denying that there was institutionalised racism against Aboriginal people. Bolt was there to launch Windschuttle’s latest book on the subject entitled ‘The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume 3: The Stolen Generations’.

Bolt, who thinks that white Australian racism is a myth, (I kid you not! See here) and his racist mates have embarked on a concerted effort to prove that, not only are white Australians not racist and never have been, but that white Australians, who Bolt has jingoistically labelled ‘Skips’, are actually being racially discriminated against by non-whites and non-Australian born foreigners in Australia.

What is emerging is a co-ordinated and somewhat transparent effort by extreme right-wing racists to promote racism in Australia by claiming that white Australians are the real victims of racism. Using all the propaganda power they are able to muster, they have attempted to marginalise non-white immigrants by accusing them of coming to Australia to deliberately target white Australians and the white Australian way of life. One of their ilk, the paranoid racist propagandist Piers Akerman, another racist that thinks the stolen generation is a myth, even accused foreign-born Islamists in Australia of having deliberately lit the Victorian bushfires of last year.

The one positive that comes from their racist rantings is the fact that, rather than denying that white racism exists in Australia, the denial itself is so obviously racist that it reinforces the notion that white Australian racism does exist and, indeed, is as strong today as it was in the old White Australia Policy days of yesteryear.

Fortunately, the main bulk of Australia has moved on from the views of these racist dinosaurs and can see through their racist propaganda. Their racist views do not go anywhere near representing the vast majority of real Australians – whether they were born here or not and regardless of the colour of their skin, their religion or their culture.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

While the US and Israel have been busily accusing others of ‘terrorism’ for years, the reality that very few seem able to see is that the only people with their boots on dirt that doesn’t belong to them are the US and Israel. The people that the US and Israel call ‘terrorists’ are actually only people that are defending their lands and culture against occupation and denigration.

When Israel was created in 1948, Zionists seized by using terrorist methods much more than was given to them by the UN. They used massacres and fear to drive the Palestinians out of their lands. Once Israel had become a state, it immediately accused Palestinians that resisted Israeli expansion of being ‘terrorists’. The label has stuck ever since.

But who are the real terrorists here?

From the day Israel was created, it has used classic terrorist methods in order to expand its own territory and to eliminate Palestinian and Arab opposition. In 1967 it goaded and provoked Syria, the Palestinians and surrounding Arab states into a war that they then accused their enemies of starting. As a result, the Israelis took over and occupied lands that did not belong to them including the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai. The Sinai was merely a bargaining chip for the Israelis and they soon handed it back to the Egyptians in exchange for a promise that they wouldn’t give Israel a hard time in the future.

The Gaza Strip was colonized by the Israelis but the Palestinians were able to give them a hard enough time that they eventually gave up and left. The Israelis hope that one day they’ll be able to drive the Palestinians completely out of the Gaza Strip by slowly depriving them of the ability to live. As well as the deprivations, the Israelis also find opportunities and excuses to bomb and destroy homes, schools, supply tunnels, government buildings, power plants, flourmills, as well as killing thousands of Palestinians by frequent aerial bombardments and land incursions into the Gaza all in the hope of terrorising them enough that they want to leave. Once the Palestinians have gone, the Israelis would then return.

The Israelis have also slowly and insidiously began to colonise the West Bank by building ‘settlements’ within the West Bank and barriers that plunge deep into Palestinian lands. They have also confined Palestinians into a series of ever-shrinking ghettos within the West Bank whereby they find it difficult to move about from one part to another. Palestinians are thrown out from their homes to make way for Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and elsewhere. Olive groves and farmlands are destroyed and water resources are either contaminated and spoiled or diverted for use by Israeli settlers.

The Israelis have not given up their dream of a Greater Israel that includes south Lebanon up to the Litani River. Three times the Israelis have attempted to occupy south Lebanon and each time sooner or later they have been driven back by Hezbollah.

Israel, despite denials, has long been a nuclear state and is said to have between 200 and 400 nuclear weapons. Its ally, the US, is, of course, also a nuclear state. Israel, using the influence of highly placed American Zionists, has been able to forge an alliance with the US which the Zionists in Israel are able to utilize. Massive military aid is afforded to Israel from the US. The US provides Israel with some of the world’s most sophisticated weapons. The US provides veto power to most resolutions that are not in Israel’s interest. The US delays UN resolutions in order to give Israel a favourable advantage.

The US and Israel have become so intrinsically entwined with each other that their foreign policy towards the Middle East is identical. George W. Bush and his neoconservative-Zionist dominated administration worked in concert with Israel to bring about an end to Israel’s most immediate enemy, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who was providing support to the Palestinians in the Second Intifada which had been deliberately provoked by Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. As a result of the neoconservative-Zionists efforts, the US and their allies invaded Iraq which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, possibly over a million, and the displacement of millions more in a war that continues to this day and all but destroyed Iraq.

Now the US is wholeheartedly supporting Israel’s push against Iran in order to effect regime change. Their rhetoric claims, despite the total and utter lack of any supporting evidence whatsoever, that Iran has a ‘nuclear weapons program’ and, furthermore, are intent on using such a nuclear weapon against Israel, despite the certainty of complete annihilation of Iran if it did so. The nuclear weapons rhetoric and propaganda is exactly the same as that which was used in the run up to the invasion and destruction of Iraq.

The reason Israel and the US are anxious about Iran is that they want to disable Iran’s ability to support Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas in order that they can no longer resist Israel’s intentions of creating a Greater Israel at the their expense. Since Israel has attempted to take over these places before without having eliminated Iran from the equation and failed, they now see that the dream of a Greater Israel can only be fulfilled if Iran is neutralised. The advantage of doing this by war is that it then provides the opportunity for Israel to simultaneously attack both Hezbollah and Hamas full on, claiming that it is preventing retaliation, while the US deals with Iran after an initial first strike by Israel. The need for a first strike against Iran by Israel is simply for appearances sake since American and Western public opinion would not tolerate a first strike by the US or any of its allies.

Recently, as the rhetoric is ramped up toward war, there have been some suggestions that so-called ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ may be used against Iran in the event of a pre-emptive strike. The talk of ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ being used and the use of the word ‘tactical’ are clearly designed to prepare the world for their possible use. Both the US and Israel are acutely aware that world public opinion would not at all tolerate the pre-emptive use of a strategic nuclear weapon of any sort against Iran, but, by using the word ‘tactical’, they hope that their use may be more acceptable if the people were told that they are being used to eliminate Irans ‘nuclear weapons facilities’. The reality is, if they are used, they are likely also to be used against Iran’s defences and governmental institutions as well. The whole operation would be designed to enforce Iranian capitulation and the installation of a government friendly to the West. Invasion and occupation would not at all be the intention.

Both the US and Israel are nuclear armed. It is only a matter of time before they use, or at least threaten to use these weapons against a non-nuclear armed state in order to achieve Israeli expansionist objectives into the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and south Lebanon, and consolidate US hegemonic objectives in the Middle East and Central Asia generally, thus securing energy resources for the West. The spin-off of successfully using ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ might well be that the Taliban in Afghanistan may think twice about further defending themselves against the US and NATO occupation.

Everyone one is aware of the terrifying consequences of using a nuclear bomb. To use them against another nuclear armed nation has been mans fear ever since the USSR had a weapon to match the US’s and that fear has been terrifying enough as all those that lived through the Cold War period can tell you. But to threaten to use or pre-emptively use a nuclear weapon against a non-nuclear armed nation using false pretences for expansionist and hegemonic purposes is nothing less than nuclear state terrorism.

The world should not be fooled by US and Israeli intentions. They are the real terrorists of the Twenty-first century.

On Sunday 14 February 2010, 2 days after the launch of an allied assault against the Taliban held town of Marjah in Helmand province, Afghanistan, it was reported that a rogue NATO rocket had killed twelve Afghan civilians. General Stanley McChrystal, the NATO commander expressed his profound regrets at the deaths and added that avoiding civilian deaths had been ‘a cornerstone of the war strategy’. Some confusion then set in and it wasn’t immediately clear if one rocket had been fired or two. Meanwhile, as a result of the ‘tragedy’ the weapon used was withdrawn from use.

If there is one thing the US and their allies have become adept at sine 9/11 it is turning a negative into a positive when it comes to propaganda.

Since Sunday the allies have clearly been thinking about the very negative impact that the news of the killing of Afghan civilians would have on both public opinion at home and on the people that they are pretending to ‘liberate’. As a result, by yesterday, 17 February 2010, the one rocket that had somehow strayed off some 300 meters from its intended target, morphed into two rockets that were deliberately launched at the target it hit which the allies now say contained Taliban fighters and that the civilians killed were being used as human shields. Oddly, however, no Taliban fighters were found among the dead. Now the allies are using the ‘Taliban are using human shields’ theme as an excuse to explain their inability to progress in their onslaught against the few Taliban fighters left in Marjah. Of course, accusing the Taliban of using civilians as human shields kills three birds with one stone; it provides a vindication for the deaths of twelve civilians by putting the blame on those the allies are attacking, it provides an explanation for the slow progress of a major assault by 15000 highly trained and well armed soldiers against a handful of ill-equipped and poorly trained guerrilla fighters, and it demeans the fighters painting them as evil cowards hiding behind civilians. (Does all this sound familiar to you yet?)

Guerrilla fighters don’t have barracks to stay in, they have no use for open battlefields, in many cases the local civilians are also the guerrilla fighters and where they are killed is very often their home. Guerrilla fighting is a form of warfare that relies on being able to count on the local community’s help for food and shelter. The Western allies are trying to paint a picture where soldiers should be on a battlefield fighting each other that and that those that do not are cowards. We’ve seen this in every guerrilla war that the West, particularly the US, have been in. Most recent, of course, has been the wars launched against the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip.

The reality is; there is no evidence that Taliban fighters deliberately use civilians as human shields. Those that are making the accusations are merely covering for their own mistakes and the fact that have no right to be on dirt that doesn’t belong to them in the first place.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Vice-President Joe Biden is expected to visit Israel within the next week or so close on the heels of US military chief Michael Mullen’s recent visit. According to at least one report, Biden will be putting pressure on Israel to hold off on attacking Iran unilaterally.

This is pure nonsense. The reality is this: Israel is in no position to unilaterally attack Iran. Any attack on Iran by Israel can only be accomplished with the full connivance of the US. There is no way that Israel is able to muster its forces, collect the military jet fuel, obtain the appropriate bunker-buster bombs, fly the distance to the targets in Iran from Israel, gain the intelligence they need for such a mission, and, at the same time, prepare and cope with the retaliation expected from Hezbollah and Hamas without the Americans knowing about it. Furthermore, since the aim of attacking Iran is to bring Iran to its knees in order to effect regime change, merely bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities is going to do nothing achieve regime change. Having stirred the Iranian hornets nest, the Israelis will need to also attack Iran’s defence and governmental institutions and destroy them. It can only do that by using nuclear weapons.

Israel may argue that the use of tactical nuclear weapons is justified, but one should be aware that there really is no such thing as a ‘tactical nuclear weapon’. A nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon. The ‘tactical’ label is there only to excuse or justify its use.

If Israel launches what it tells the world is a unilateral pre-emptive strike, one can rest assured that it is not at all ‘unilateral’ and will have the full and complete support of the Obama administration. Israel may well make the first strike in order to maintain the illusion that such a strike is, indeed, unilateral but the US will be there to back up the Israeli first strike with secondary strikes very soon after.

The façade of the ‘unilateral Israeli attack on Iran’ is designed to deflect American and world public opinion that would likely object to another war in the Middle East if such a war was being openly prepared as it was prior to the attack on Iraq which saw millions of people world wide out on the streets protesting. The Western allies cannot afford a repeat of such demonstrations.

The attack against Iran is likely to be sparked by the Israelis as they make the first strike. The US will then follow up as if appearing to have no choice but to protect its Middle East partner.The world is being conned – again.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Two days into the assault on Marjah in Helmand province, Afghanistan, and one has to wonder what all the fuss was about. One also has to wonder why there was any assault in the first place. It’s achieved absolutely nothing for the allies – apart that is, from having succeeded in capturing one of the largest heroin producing regions in Afghanistan.

The allies haven’t even come close to destroying the Taliban in the area. Thanks to the advanced warning given to all the people of Marjah of the forthcoming offensive, virtually all of the 200 or 300 local resistance fighters simply melted away with the rest of the population. As a result, allied forces have taken few casualties though 12 Afghan civilians were killed during a rocket attack launched by the allies. Most of the troops that were lined up for the assault weren’t needed and are being held in reserve.

Clearly, the aim, contrary to earlier statements, was not to destroy the Taliban. Why else would one warn an enemy of an impending assault? The Taliban have simply moved themselves out of harms way and will return at a later date once the main allied assault troops have moved out leaving only occupation troops. Obviously, that amount of troop deployment can’t be sustained just to hold the area. If that were followed through throughout Afghanistan then the allies would need several hundreds of thousands of troops to maintain control of the whole country if it takes 15,000 troops just to keep 200 to 300 Taliban fighters at bay. In classic guerrilla style, the insurgents will simply bide their time and then nibble away at the occupation troops that are left behind at a later date just when the occupiers relax their guard thinking that the fighters aren’t coming back.

As mentioned above, the allies have got off to a bad start by killing Afghan civilians. This is compounded by the fact that prior to launching their assault, the allies told civilians to stay where they were and to stay at home. The incident is likely only to succeed in enraging the resistance fighters further and to provide them with more fighters as the relatives and friends who have had their lives disrupted by the deaths seek to avenge them.

The whole exercise is one of futility. Obama has no idea as to how the Afghanistan war can ever be resolved. The Americans are unable to learn any of the lessons that were forced upon them from their past experiences of going to war against peoples in their own land. Apart from maybe wanting to acquire some poppy-growing real estate, this futile attack against the Afghan people which is likely only to end up killing civilians and kidz conned into uniforms, seems to be nothing less than a PR job by the allies to show that they are making use of the troops ‘surged’ to Afghanistan and that they can make a small region free of the Taliban – for a while at least. All the exercise has been so far is a massive display of allied firepower; a display that the Taliban fighters are hardly likely to be impressed by. And since the firepower has been unleashed at civilian’s houses, (the Taliban don’t have barracks to stay in), the civilians aren’t likely to be impressed either – especially as more and more of them are killed.

So, where to from here for Obama and the allies? Whose next on the allies Afghanistan hit list?

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Garry Morgan, executive chairman of Roy Morgan Research, one of Australasia’s most respected pollsters, has recently accused News Ltd’s Newspoll owned by Rupert Murdoch of deliberately allowing Newspoll figures to be published knowing them to be in error. In other words; Newspoll have been caught fudging the numbers to suit their political agenda.

According to Gary Morgan, in a poll conducted early in November last year Newspoll claimed that coalition support had jumped 7% while ALP support had dropped 7%. Such a large margin of change, coupled with another figure showing the Consumer Confidence Rating going up in contradiction to what one would normally expect given Newspoll’s numbers, should have rung alarm bells that in turn should have led to another poll being taken straight away said Gary Morgan. This did not happen and News Ltd went ahead and published the false figures.

Furthermore, not only were the ‘rogue’ figures published, but figures that showed strong support for Labor regarding their policies about ‘boat people’ refugees were not published.

Morgan said, “That pollsters and those that publish the polls have a responsibility to report the facts and the truth”. He went on to say that, “Polls and their publishers should not seek to set the agenda by selectively releasing polling data”, and that, “Polls and their publishers are powerful but with that power comes responsibility”.

Sunday, February 07, 2010

Israel and the US, together with their Western allies, continue to pile on the pressure over Iran’s so-called nuclear weapons program. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has visited Turkey to discuss how Turkey might join a “NATO-wide missile defense system, which would be focused on the possibility of an attack from Iran”. This follows last week’s deployment of Patriot defence missiles to the Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, and Bahrain as well as two defence missile ships in and around the Mediterranean. To top off the provocations, Israel sent two missile ships to the Gulf via the Suez Canal which they passed through last Thursday (4 February).

These moves are deliberately designed to intimidate and provoke Iran into ‘lashing out’, possibly using Hezbollah and Hamas, which would provide the US and Israel a casus belli to attack Iran for the purpose of effecting regime change.

In the event that Iran is attacked, as it now seems increasingly likely, Israel will most likely simultaneously attack Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and possibly Syria, who Israel have lately been threatening, in strikes the Israelis will claim will be to pre-empt Iranian retaliation against Israel.

Yet, despite the gathering pace to war, the world seems disinterested in demanding there be no more wars. The world seems to have forgotten how the same lies that are being said today about Iran’s ‘nuclear weapons program’ are exactly the same as those that they told to the world about Iraq. In the lead up to that war, the peoples of the world were out in the streets in their millions; yet now, when a war is looming that has the potential to be far more devastating than the one that destroyed Iraq, we are doing nothing.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

The other day the Iranian government conceded to UN demands that it send its Uranium abroad for enrichment. It was just what the Western power alliance was asking the Iranians to do under threat of further sanctions. I argued yesterday that such a move would likely upset the Israelis and the US because conceding to the demands would deprive them of a casus belli to attack them directly and that they would have to find some other way of getting at them. I figured that it would mostly likely be through one or both of Iran’s allies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. I never imagined that the Western allies would be so stupid as to play the dumbest piece of Chutzpah in the book by rejecting Iran’s offer to comply because – wait for it – they reckon Iran is only making the offer in order to avoid sanctions!!

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

To many observers in the West it may seem that Iran’s decision to comply with the United Nations requirements for Iran to send its Uranium abroad for enrichment is a victory for Israel and the US who will no doubt claim that Iran’s leaders have succumbed to US and Western pressure and threats of further sanctions.

It is, however, not the outcome that the Israelis and the neocon-influenced Obama administration really want. Iran’s compliance with UN requirements does two things which the Israelis and neoconservatives wished to avoid. Firstly, it deprives the West of an excuse to directly attack Iran in order to affect regime change. Secondly, and perhaps far more importantly, it also leaves Iran in a position to continue to support their allies Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and also Syria. With no excuse now to directly attack Iran using Iran’s so-called ‘nuclear weapons program’ as an excuse, Israel will now have to confront Hezbollah and Hamas directly in an effort to flush out evidence of substantial Iranian support in order to use that as a casus belli to attack Iran.

In recent bellicose talk from Israel about confrontation with Hezbollah, Syria has also been mentioned by Defence Minister Ehud Barak as a potential target for Israeli ‘defensive’ action in the event of war against Hezbollah. The destruction of Hezbollah and Hamas has always been Israel’s aim. Both organisations are all that stands between Zionist Israel and their expansionist dreams of a Greater Israel that includes the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and south Lebanon up to the Litani River. In 2006 Israel attempted for the third time to invade and occupy south Lebanon but was beaten back by remorseless Hezbollah attacks against the invaders despite being on the receiving end of equally remorseless attacks by Israeli bombers against Lebanon’s population which killed and wounded thousands of Lebanese civilians and destroyed much of Lebanon’s infrastructure.

In light of Iran’s latest effort to stymie US and Israel, Israel will now have to find some other ‘provocation’ with which to attack Hezbollah and Hamas - and ultimately, Iran.

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About Me

is an Aeronautical Engineer, Historian and general carer of what goes on in the world.
Apart from an earlier career in engineering, Lataan also has a First Class Honours BA degree in History and a PhD in International Politics.
All material on this site is available for use without permission but it would be appreciated if the source is acknowledged.